Today's cellular networks for wireless communication are required to support a large variety of different forms of communications. Some examples of communications typically taking place in a communication network is voice calls, video calls, transfer of small and large data files, streaming of audio and video and so on. In addition to the various forms of communications, the communications take place at different times during the day and night. This leads to a highly fluctuating traffic volume during the day and night hours. Still further, the traffic volume also differs from one cell to the other. When planning and designing capacity in a cellular network, the different peaks of traffic volume or load in the different cells in the network are taken into account in order to provide a reliable communication network that will to a large extent provide its customers with requested communication services to all the customers in each cell, also during peak hour traffic.
Since the communication networks are designed to provide or support requested communication services to all the customers in each cell, also during peak hour traffic, substantial capacity exists which remains unused during off-peak hours. During off-peak hours, the traffic volume or load is smaller, which means that the capacity which remains unused is wasted.
In order to smooth out the traffic volume or load over time, the radio network can control caching of data information communication which need not be delivered in real-time.
One approach for controlling the traffic volume or load is to virtually partition a storage of the client or user equipment such that at least one partition of the storage of the client or user equipment is owned by the operator of the wireless communication network. Such a solution implies that the network operator has access to the specific partition and the end-user, i.e. the user of the user equipment, cannot access it, while the operator is in control of the caching of data information in the user equipment using the specific partition.
Another approach is to download the data information to a storage or cache in the application layer at the network.
The above approaches suffer from several drawbacks. In the first solution, the user of the user equipment has to “give up” a partition of his/her storage capacity to the operator and the user will not be in control over this partition. In the second solution, the downloading to the storage or cache in the application layer may take place at an undesirable point in time when the radio conditions are unfavourable or the network load is already high.